Review: ‘Tomorrow in the Battle’ @ Stageworks

HUDSON — Stageworks/Hudson is an invaluable part of the local theater scene. The company can be counted on to blast through convention and challenge audiences with exciting, unusual works.

This year, its late-summer production, “Tomorrow in the Battle,” by the British dramatist Kieron Barry, is a restaging of the play’s world premiere, presented at Stageworks two years ago. Both productions were directed by Laura Margolis, the company’s artistic director.

The play is as bracing as a slap, as rewarding as it is unexpected. Barry’s dialogue is brilliant, imbuing the sounds of everyday speech with rich poetic imagery. Considering a failing dinner-party entrée, one character says, “The chicken’s looking at me with nothing but sarcasm.” Another dryly notes that she’s been following a teenager’s Facebook page and its account of his “increasingly contentious chairmanship of the guitar club.” A heart surgeon describes opening a chest for a transplant and facing a “splashy velvet bedlam.”

The funny and evocative and frank lines come fast and in abundance in “Tomorrow in the Battle,” which is structured as three people telling overlapping stories. The characters don’t address each other directly, and they don’t interact in any conventional sense; they physically touch one another on just two or three occasions. Randall Parsons’ minimalist set takes full advantage of Stageworks’ unusually deep stage by running three criss-crossing catwalks of different heights from back to front. Asides from taller, rectangular forms that double as benches, that’s all there is on the stage, putting the actors in an abstract space that the language, and occasional projections and sound, transform into locations as varied as a home, an opera house, a hotel room, a parliamentary committee and the New York Stock Exchange.

Simon (Christopher Kelly) is the aforementioned surgeon, who specializes in pediatric cases. He’s married to Anna (Danielle Skraastad, the only returning cast member from the original production), a nuclear-weapons specialist facing an investigation, but begins a fling with Jennifer (Olivia Gilliatt), a younger woman who’s part of a highly successful investment firm. Their affair is one of the most vivid and convincing depictions I’ve yet seen of deranging erotic connection, which is an achievement, given how little the characters directly interact.

As individual pressures mount on each person, the tension and stakes have the palpable grip of real life, and the actors never hit a false note. Once the play gets its teeth in your guts, it never lets go. Thinking about it afterward, the ending seems obvious and a little pat, but in the moment, it’s a shock, as startling and effective and final as the slam of a door.